Archive for Visual Design

Do you have what it takes to be a Kicker? Kicker Studio, a small boutique design company specializing in digital and physical interfaces, is looking for a Senior Designer to join us in our mission to make technology speak human. Because a user interface should…

We are excited to give you a sneak peek at our latest project, a gesture-controlled movie browser platform developed with Omek Interactive for Jinni, a movie genome company, which will be debuting at CES on January 10, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. When Omek approached…

Kicker Studio marked our 3rd Anniversary on August 8, 2011. To celebrate, we hosted the Second Annual Device Design Day at the San Francisco Art Institute, Jody’s alma matter. It was a great success thanks to inspiring speakers and involved attendees. Couldn’t make it? Don’t…

I’ve always been really bothered by the term ‘form and function’. It somehow implies that form is outside of function. As if they are two completely separate things. In fact, I think form and function have a relationship that is a lot more blurred. That in fact, form is part of function.

Recently, I read an article by Khoi Vinh, entitled iPad Magazines Go to ’11, expounding on the failure of digital magazines. He suggested the problem is in the glossy presentation layer of the content. Let’s not be duped into this, again. People love “glossy”. It’s…

I’m a long-time user of the Mac Twitter client Tweetie. Tweetie was so well done, Twitter purchased them and made Tweetie the official Mac Twitter client (renamed to just Twitter). Yesterday was the launch of its new version, one that many of us have been waiting over a year for. Especially considering the fantastic update to Twitter.com and the excellent new iPad clients such as Twitter’s own, I had high expectations for this release, and sadly, Twitter did not deliver. Twitter 2 for Mac is a major disappointment, flawed on many levels.

I’ve put a handful of books on my iPad over the last few weeks, but I have to admit: I keep forgetting to read them. Not because the books aren’t good, but because, unlike physical books, ebooks take up no psychic space. Physical books by the nature of them being, well, physical and visible, remind me to read them. This isn’t true of digital books. I can’t currently glance at the app icon and know whether I have a library beneath it, waiting to be read, or nothing. There’s no visual affordance that there is anything there for me to engage with.

What you have here is what I call cinematic reading. The “camera” moves from item to item like a camera would, or like your eye would if you were scanning the page, then stopping to read different items: text to partial image to fuller image to whole page, in a variety of configurations. You can, of course, manually override it via double tap or pinching/spreading. But it offers a solution that could be applied to other combinations of text and image: that is, reading that isn’t books or mostly text articles. Namely: magazines.

What a gauge or any indicator on a dashboard should display is either status (what is happening now, e.g. my radio station, the time, signal strength, wash cycle, etc.) or resources: how much of a particular thing I have remaining. Could be fuel, could be unread messages, could be time. Figure out what the most important resources and statuses are, filter by the frequency of use, then make those indicators the most prominent.